


Bowercat

by Duckface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:49:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the universe where Nepeta beat Gamzee.    When you stab a clown to death, you are left with certain responsibilities - among them, in this case, the care and feeding of his terrible caliginous girlfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bowercat

Personal hygiene went first, as it often does.

There is laundry in space, but there ceases to be a point after a while – there’s nowhere for the funk to escape to, so space is the place where everyone smells like gym shorts. Some of the trolls hadn’t even bothered to alchemize changes of clothes. It didn’t occur to them. What did they know from living with other people? It wasn’t natural; it had never been natural, and neither was minty freshness. For them, mint was over. For them, mint had never begun.

The human kids did their best. Dave never let on what he wore under the glorified tracksuit the gods bestowed upon him, but he took his socks very seriously, the whitest and cushiest of sport socks, in case, as he said, there was sports. He alchemized them by the hundredweight. When Rose asked why he couldn’t just wash them like a normal person – functional infinitude of available footwear being a dangerous luxury – he said that he would, except some clown kept stealing them. Some specific, particular clown. Some dripping purple hobo yeti clown. **(1)** Some honk-ass insufferable murdertool. Riding and ripping, ripping and riding – no seam safe from the unstoppable juggalo foot freak. Dude spends all his time rapping about insteps. Not even balloons or some shit like that. He’s a disgrace to the clown fetish community. They can’t abide him. He doesn’t even get invited to the conferences anymore, even though he can still pull more flags of all nations out of his terrible alien ass than anyone else on the starlight train to clownsville.

As it happens, the clown in question had been ejected from the meteor some time ago, cashed out via airlock and spun into the void of paradox space like a tiny honking sputnik. The perpetrator - or ‘purrpetrator’, as she called herself, even (and especially) in the privacy of her own head - kept this information to herself. For where others collected piles of shitty wands and shitty eight-balls and incredibly shitty clown paraphernalia, Nepeta collected piles of secrets.

Also laundry. She was the one taking the laundry.

And Vriska's still dead. Terezi killed her. That didn't stop being a thing that happened or anything. 

I should mention at this point that if you can’t handle that kind of mind-boggling revelation you probably shouldn't be reading this.

\--

Picture now an abandoned server room, clotted with dust, strewn with the fruits of the rogue’s criminal enterprise. Mountains of socks, time-crusted (we hope that’s time they’re crusted with) – a galaxy of discarded towels, stiff and matted with sweat – drifts of cocktail dresses flecked with mysterious gelid stains, piles of geometrically dubious fripperies wrought of lace and satin and the delicate bones of xenobiological impossibilities, along with, if we’re being frank, a lot of elastic - an army of pocket tees, ink-stained and spittle-flecked, mile-long skeins of ugly scarf.

Anyway, picture it. It was like the carefully-assembled nest of a Satin Bowercat, which is absolutely a real thing that exists. Delicately arrayed in their color-coded masses, spread with the abundance of fetid flower-petals, the whorls of captured washing led the eye directly and inevitably to the focus of the room, the pile within piles, the bower itself. There, perched on a morass of discarded throw pillows, the mistress of this place was busy arranging the piece de resistance – a splash of clean scarlet in a room full of dank, the centerpiece of the whole shebang. She had washed this one. Oh yes. She washed it with her _tongue_.

It was Terezi’s dragon hood. Right? That is the point.

A final tweak and everything was in place. Nepeta stepped back to admire her work, grooving a little on the perfect asymmetry of it all. If she were in fact a Bowercat the next step would be to prepare a [little dance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzZj21Gs4U) to make her incipient guest feel at home, but she suspected that things would get out of hand well before such niceties came into play. She contented herself with a full-body wiggle in a pile of grubsauce-stained pajamas.

She was just starting to get into it when the barest click of cane on marble stopped her cold.

 _It begins_.

(began? Began.)

\--

The proud legislacerator had smelled some things in her time – she was no wet-behind-the-ears fresh from-the-academy greenhorn noob vomiting into a trashcan at the first whiff of loose-flapping organ meats. Still, most of the crimes she’d witnessed, foul though they’d been, only stank _metaphorically_. This was something else. The violent, pervasive and above all _personal_ odors that filled this room were not content to remain someone else’s business. They were her business, all up in her business, and she was going to make it her business, because this was her business, and as businesses went, it wasn’t bad.

It beat thinking.

It was kind of Nepeta to do this for her, really, all things considered.

The clues had been so charmingly heavy-handed that they almost ruined the joke. Not enough to leave a telltale blue thread, a smear of ash and blood on an upturned cabinet, a careless catspaw print in the chalk dust – no, it had to be the thread AND the blood AND the print AND a decapitated squeakbeast AND an entire pink teapot out in the hall with the spout pointing jauntily in the precise direction of the culprit’s absquatulation.  **(2)**   This was amateur hour, was the point. But then, if the gesture hadn’t been so clear, if it wasn’t such a transparent ploy to make her feel interested, she might not have bothered. It took a lot to get her out of her room these days.

She picked up each crumb in dutiful succession, watching herself as she went. The investigation could not have proceeded more smoothly. Each victim, interviewed in turn, told the same tale – each scrap of evidence, scattered in mocking abundance, pulled the noose tighter. She remembered what the urge to play had been like, and it was easy to slip back into the physicality of it – there were always more scalemates to ruin, always more walls to deface. Like being a kid again, she thought, hoisting a recalcitrant witness by his fuzzy, plush lapels.

Not everyone was convinced. Karkat, during an interview about the disappearance of a precious article of clothing that he was not willing to describe in detail, **(3)** told her that acting like a crazy person only made sense if a) she cared about whether people thought she was crazy or b) she was actually crazy, and since neither of those things were currently true, what she was doing now was like “THE SAD, SMOKING CRATER OF A BURNED-OUT LAWNRING. NO-ONE ESCAPED. THERE ARE CHARRED TOYS FOR WIGGLERS SITTING FORLORNLY IN THE RUINS BUT THEY’RE ALL SO MELTED AND MISSHAPEN THAT IT’S NOT EVEN WORTH GETTING SENTIMENTAL ABOUT. EVERYTHING IS JUST UGLY AND RUINED. A QUIVERING ADOLESCENT FUCKNUB WITH A PHOTO EMULSION DEVICE AND A DREAM STANDS WATCHING THE DEVASTATION AND FUCKING TURNS HER BACK ON IT IN DISGUST. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, PYROPE.” There were tears in his eyes, predictably. She cuffed him a few times for withholding evidence and moved on.

If murdering imaginary dragons had lost its special savor, and the taste of cerulean blood still fretted at the edges of her tongue, well. We all get older. It’s harder to bounce back.

\--

"Submit to the iron fist of justice, or whatever."

There was no response. A flicker of movement disturbed a fresh waft of weeks-old bodily unpleasantness.

"Seriously, this is a good effort, I have been in constant danger of enjoying myself, but if you don’t get out here and receive my righteous judgment I’m going to leave."

There was a muffled giggle, from - somewhere. Terezi inched forward, trying to breathe as little as possible. Nepeta was a filthy needle in a filthy haystack, a blur of nasal horror against a Bosch painting of BO and sour milk.

"You are making this way more difficult than it needs to be", she yelled into the abyss.

A boot landed squarely in the small of her back, sending her sprawling into a pile of unaccountably moist bath towels. It took her seconds to untangle herself – comically slow, by her standards. What had she been doing with herself? What was she doing _here_ , for that matter? Struggling back to her feet with the grace of a landed goose, she swung, on the off chance. Her cane sliced air.

"That is the worst attempt at furrplay I have ever seen," came a voice from the shuddering gloom. "You could’ve at least said ‘oh no, my one weakness’ or something when you walked in here, you know. It took me weeks to put this together, and you’re being a big coolkid party pooper about it." Terezi leapt at the source of the voice, stabbed, missed. "Also, you’re being pawfully murdery for someone who doesn’t care about anything."

"You’re being pawfully - _awfully_ presumptuous! About at least three different things, actually. I am here to get my hood back - the drubbing which you are about to receive is completely incidental." She could feel little bits of her brain shutting down, overpowered by the almighty stench. Walking away seemed like a perfectly decent option, actually, but she wanted her hood back. And leaving would mean losing, of course. Which wasn’t a big deal, or anything. Still.

“You aren’t drubbing anyone today, Miss Legislacelator!” There: the voice. Triangulate, leap. A swing and a miss. "In a stunning yet narratively satisfying purrn of events, it is I, the plucky – oof, sorry, hang on, I’m caught in someone’s weird alien underwear" - triangulate, leap, swing, miss, boot, agony - "the plucky and dashingly renegade pouncellor who is going to apply the comeuppance here. And if you fell for that one, you are absolutely in need of some sense-knocking –"

"This is stupid."

Nepeta was suddenly inches away. There was a blur, a gust, a dull thud, and Terezi was sailing through the air, her cane spiraling away in the darkness. An impressive amount of hangtime ensued – enough that she had time to register what was happening, and to reflect that nobody ever remembered how strong Nep was, before she hit the ground.

"You hit me", she said, after an appropriate period of jaw-clutching.

"The distinguished and frankly extremely attractive pouncellor has in fact been forced to mewt out some rough justice. I find you in contempt of courtblock, and guilty of moping around everywhere and just being incredibly boring about everything." There was a rustling, and Terezi caught a whiff of ash and burnt fat snaking through the kaleidoscopic laundry madness. The girl must have rolled in something – must not have washed her clothes for weeks – but there was still a thread there, something to pull on. Olive blood, pumping through an olive heart. The dark, solid green of – what? Tea. Burnt rice in green tea. Ice cream, all the shades of green in ice cream, from pistachio to mint to - something smooth -

"I have really excellent reasons for moping around," Terezi said. Keep her talking.

“We all do, stupid!” That rustling again. The smell was brighter, suddenly. “You’re completely prepawsterous – always so smart, nefur let anyone do anything without making fun of them, and the first time something goes wrong you turn into this huge wet blanket. I thought you were better than that! I let you get away with so much, I let you be so mean! I thought you knew what you were doing!"

"In my defense, I never pretended not to be a huge murdering jerk." Breathe. Breathe. Green, slime green, warm green. It might have been the head trauma, but along the burnt psychedelic edge of the cauldron of smells, a shape was emerging, and a space – an emptiness. Something to occupy. Up to the right, and - was that a flare of scarlet? Bright cherry silk?

_A fatal error, Ms. Pouncellor. You have led me to my prey._

With a mighty battle cry, Terezi leapt.

\--

It was over in seconds. **(4)**  She had not been ready for the feeling of bare skin under her fingers, and she was off-balance anyway, and Nepeta was a more experienced grappler, and the whole thing was a trap in the first place, so she couldn’t really blame herself for succumbing so quickly. Still, she had no idea how Nepeta had managed to pinion both of her wrists with one hand, or, if she hadn’t, where exactly she’d been keeping the clothes pin.  **(5)**

When she felt the pressure on the bridge of her nose, the little spike of pain, her first reaction had been immense relief – cut off from the riot of smell, nothing left but echo – followed by the uncomfortable realization that she was trapped and blind under a naked catgirl. There was a certain persistence in Nepeta’s warmth, her weight and movement, how she could never keep still, little vibrations running down her spine. How long it had been since she’d laid down in true darkness, how long it had been since there’d been someone this close.

She struggled, and spit, because that was what you did in these situations. Nepeta laughed, and forced her down into the softness of the bower, forehead on forehead.

"It doesn’t have to be black, if you don’t want it to be. I’m going to beat you up anyway – I’m going to bite you anyway. OK? But it doesn’t have to be black.

"You got stabbed in the heart – I can feel where it happened. When she turned away from you, that last time, right? You lost your best friend, and then you killed her. You got stabbed in the heart, went coolkid-tier, finally. A big nothing. Like you always wanted to be.

"I can take your heart, if you want. For safekeeping, until you’re ready for it back."

The cleft of her lip brushed down, past jugular, past nape, past collarbone, to set fast in the hollow beneath, through the fabric, and then there was nothing but teeth.

\--

It vacillated like a duck caught in a wind tunnel, and no-one approved, and all efforts at auspisticizing were met with derisive laughter and thrown objects, and they made life hell for everyone around them, and it _kept happening_ , which was the biggest bafflement and fuck you of them all. They would set the chess golems loose and take their time hunting them down, turning vast swathes of the meteor into deathtraps for the unwary – they would steal treasures from their friends and then catch them in snares and deadfall pits, leaving them hanging for days. Terezi walked around covered in bruises, and Karkat had panic attacks, and Nepeta would say that Equius was spinning in his space grave, and then she would laugh, and then cry, and then they would go kill something, which is the only way Terezi ever learned to deal with her feelings, ever, and it is a miracle that they grew so old together, and a miracle that the casualties were so few.

The shocking revelation at the end of this story – that Equius didn’t make it, and life went on without him – turns out not to be much of a revelation at all.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Rose left the room at this point.
> 
> 2\. It's like absconding, but more so.
> 
> 3\. IT WAS JUST – VERY TALL. ALL RIGHT? LOOK FOR SOMETHING TALL.
> 
> 4\. In another, more accurate sense, it went on for several hours, with occasional rest breaks.
> 
> 5\. "Clothes pin" is Alternian for "clothespin."


End file.
